A similar crosspost of a For Better Science post on the specific Macchiarini-linked history of the Walles themselves can be found here.

*** BEGINNING OF CROSSPOST (All of this is citation, of the original version of this post by Leonid Schneider, fetched from this cash version):

Professor Macchiarini, because Medical University of Hannover wants it so

If these days you should bump into the miracle surgeon Paolo Macchiarini,
do not just greet him with some offhand “Ciao Paolo”. But also “Hello,
Doctor Macchiarini” would not be respectful enough. As a saying goes
among German clinicians: you must take your time, namely by addressing
the great man in full as “Professor Doctor Macchiarini”. As we
know, after investigations
into the deaths and mutilation of a large number of his patients, the
former star of regenerative medicine was sacked from his professorship
at the Swedish Karolinska Institutet (KI), so that title is now
definitely gone. Macchiarini’s other professorships which he used to
convincingly carry in his CV, namely those from the University of Paris in France and University of Florence in Italy, proved to be fictional (see also KI report here). However, his adjunct professorship from the Medical University of Hannover (Medizinische Hochschule Hannover, MHH)
in Germany is very much real. Here for a change it is not Macchiarini
who is cheating, but the German university which allows him to carry
that academic title against the state’s law on adjunct professorship,
which binds it to ongoing teaching duties. Fortunately, the federal
state of Lower Saxony (which owns this Hannover university) doesn’t seem
to mind either. In fact, their officer for data protection told me it
was none of my business asking whether Professor Macchiarini had been
giving any lectures at MHH in the last years.
Macchiarini was awarded the title of adjunct (ausserplanmässiger) professor by the MHH in 2001 (some background here). Using this faculty association, he was also able to bring his loyal acolyte Philipp Jungebluth to a prize-winning
medical doctorate at MHH in 2010. Whatever the legal frame has been
back in 2001, the higher education law (Hochschulgesetz) of the federal
state of Lower Saxony stipulates in its current version from 2007, §35a, “Adjunct Professors”:

“1. Junior professors who meet the requirements of § 30
para. 4 sentence 2 and who are not employed as professors after the end
of their employment are entitled to have the title “adjunct professor”,
as long as they engage in student teaching. 2. Other persons who fulfill
the prerequisites for professors may be awarded the title of “Adjunct
Professor” for the duration of their engagement in student teaching if
they prove a previous successful teaching activity of several years. 3.
The details are regulated by the guidelines on habilitation”.

In a nutshell, this means MHH can only grant the adjunct
professorship to Macchiarini for as long as he is teaching their
students. Well, is he? The Italian surgeon departed from MHH in 2004 for Barcelona, and left behind a research project, freshly funded by the German Research Society DFG, with the title “Development of a bioartificial trachea”, part of the larger DFG-funding scheme “Lung Transplantation”, organized by his MHH clinic head, heart surgeon and founder of a large centre for “Biotechnology and Artificial Organs”(LEBAO), Axel Haverich. Apparently, the creation of artificial tracheas was carried on in Macchiarini’s absence by his LEBAO collaborators Heike Mertsching (now Walles) and her future husband Thorsten Walles. MHH’s head of press communications Stefan Zorn told
me Haverich’s team aborted that research already in 2006. Apparently
they did not mind receiving its DFG funding for 3 more years afterwards.
The Walles couple eventually moved to the University of Würzburg and tested their Macchiarini-co-developed method (Macchiarini et al 2004, Walles et al, 2004) on two more human patients (as reported in a book
by a journalist Bernhard Albrecht). One died shortly after receiving a
pig-intestine-based trachea transplant, another one (an Indian
immigrant) received a piece of decellurised pig intestine, which
apparently quickly failed as evidenced by re-opened tracheostoma. That
patient eventually committed suicide.

Update 10.12.2016. My investigations led to a legal action of the Walles couple against myself. Details in the main story here.

So much for Macchiarini’s research at MHH after his departure. But
what about his student teaching and medical activities? I was informed
that Macchiarini hasn’t been visiting Germany since 2013, but this may
have changed in the meanwhile, since he recently claimed to have
operated patients in Germany in an interview with one of his Russian sycophants.
I placed these questions to Zorn, the PR responsible at MHH:

which courses have been offered by Prof Macchiarini at MHH since 2013?

should Prof Macchiarini not comply with his mandatory teaching obligations at the MHH, how does the MHH intend to react?

is Prof Macchiarini still clinically active at the MHH, and if not, since when?

Unfortunately, Zorn completely stopped communicating with me long
ago. Most probably because I published two critical articles about the
MHH’s patriarch and patron saint Haverich, who promised to grow a living heart in his lab before his upcoming retirement and whose private company developed growing heart valve transplants which Haverich’s own papers somehow failed to convincingly prove as actually growing.
Since all my previous emails to Zorn went unanswered, I forwarded my
original inquiry as a complaint to the responsible authority, namely Office for Data Protection of the state Lower Saxony. Then Zorn suddenly wrote back, presenting as evidence a confirmation of receipt email
which he actually originally addressed not to me, but to himself. In
any case, Zorn chose not to reply to my questions. Instead, the state’s
officially independent and utterly unbiased officer for data protection,
Christoph Lahmann, wrote to me. Lahmann declared that my inquiry on
Macchiarini’s teaching activities should not be answered by MHH since it
concerns the professor’s personal sphere:

“On the admissibility of the transfer of personal data
from authorities to third parties outside the public sphere, I refer to
the Lower Saxony Data Protection Act (NDSG), §13. Here, the conditions
under which a transmission is permissible from the point of view of data
protection are determined. As a so-called authority standard, §13 NDSG
allows data transmission under the stated conditions, but does not
oblige the public authority to transmit this data. The authority may,
for example, reject the data transmission with regard to the
administrative burden, even if the legal requirements of the NSDG are
fulfilled. […]
In your application, you refer to the freedom of information act
(FOIA) of Lower Saxony. A FOIA is indeed a standard for public sector
information, provided the requested information is actually available to
the public authority and there are no grounds for refusal (eg
protection of personal data, protection of company and business secrets,
employee data protection, copyrights, etc.). 12 federal states and the
Federal Government [of Germany, -LS] have issued freedom of information
acts. There is no such freedom of information act in Lower Saxony.
I hope to have helped you with these explanations”.

That was indeed helpful, certainly for MHH. Lahmann basically rushed
to warn Zorn that he doesn’t have to tell me and my readers anything,
while instructing me and everyone else that one professor’s university
curriculum is nobody’s business. Basically, even if Prof. Macchiarini
should be currently teaching students on trachea regeneration
(personally, I think any such lecture at MHH should be televised
worldwide) or even be operating patients at the Hannover university
clinic, we are not entitled to find out. Most likely however, neither is
happening. The MHH is probably simply quietly breaking the state law,
but thanks to the kind Dr Lahmann from the state’s authority, we are now
denied the evidence.
In fact, Lahmann has excellent colleagues elsewhere in Germany who
took upon themselves the heroic task of protecting their local
universities from nosy inquires (see my reporting here).
These brave data protection officers basically declared to me that
every single thing happening on the university campus falls under
“research and teaching”, and as such exempt from FOIA. That’s because in
Germany, we trust doctors and scientists so much that we sometimes put
them above the law. Anyone wants to place a bet on how the University of
Würzburg will answer my FOIA inquiry about the trachea transplants done
by the Walles couple?